To Restaurant Owners Who Want to Harness Their Data but Can’t Get Started

by Zoë Dixon

Jul 25, 2018

When first starting out, many marketers feel like their data can be a bit insurmountable. Although you probably know that leveraging your data correctly will increase customer visit frequency, you might feel like your wheels are spinning when it comes to data interpretation. We hope that once you read this post, your data will start to feel more manageable.

Just in case using data to fuel your marketing campaigns is a new idea, here’s a quick breakdown of three of the key ways data and analytics can help restaurants become more profitable:

1. Figure Out the Motivation Behind Each Visit and Use it to Target Groups

Customers never find you by accident. Their visit is the result of various marketing touchpoints that they (either consciously or subconsciously) experienced before choosing to walk through your doors. Data and analytics can help you analyze consumer behavior to figure out which of these touchpoints had an impact, and apply that information across similar customer profiles. And an important thing to remember is that, at times, attribution can be a fallacy – our goal is to help determine which activities had an effect on those customers coming in, not what was the ultimate driver in their decision.

2. Figure Out Which Of Your Customer’s Needs Are Not Being Met To Discover New Selling Opportunities

Are all your customer’s needs being met by your present offerings? Study your current operations and identify gaps that could be modified to make profitable changes to your business. For example, would introducing a new day-part please your customers? Breakfast anyone?

Which food items are hot with your customers right now? How does the weather affect sales? How are particular staff teams preforming? All of these factors influence your bottom line, and the faster you understand, the farther ahead you’ll be.

As an operator, I’m sure this all sounds great to you. The question becomes, how should you begin to uncover insights without spending hours wading through customer data?

The first step is simply deciding how you will gather and analyze customer data for your businesses.

You could do this by looking at POS transaction data, via ecommerce activities, through your mobile app, or – arguably to gain the most holistic view of your customers – through a third-party platform which does the heavy lifting and produces the insights across all these mediums for you.

Structuring Your Customer Profiles

If you want to be able to sell your customers even more of the meals they crave, you must make the data you collect easily digestible by segmenting it to categories. From this valuable information, you’ll able to determine how to target your customers more effectively than other players.

How You Can Leverage Your Customer Profiles

Once you’ve built up robust customer profiles, you will wonder how can I continue to work smarter, make ordering convenient for my customers, and market to them quickly and easily? Customer analytics paired with technologies that can enhance the customer experience are proven to improve loyalty and retention to give brands the edge they need. We’ve found an effective way to enhance the customer experience is sending your customers targeted offers.

63% percent of Millennials and 58% of GenX consumers are willing to share data with businesses in exchange for personalized offers and discounts. Whether these offers are sent via text message, or printed on their receipt, offers presented to a brand’s loyal customers are proven to increase average check size and decrease the time between return visits. Businesses have found that promoting these offers strengthen their relationships with customers, and makes participating patrons feel like a VIP with exclusive privileges.

Using Data Beyond Customer Profiles

Once you’ve started collecting customer data, you’ll begin to see doors open to all sorts of insights. Let’s jump right into an example that shows how one restaurant working with Mobivity leveraged their data to understand which of their offers were driving average check increases for their restaurant and then used this information to reposition an offer they were already utilizing.

Franchisees have found adding free items to their offers has been positive overall because it grows their opt-in subscriber user base. Even though there is cost associated with giving away merchandise, our data that shows that when engaged customers return week after week they are actually spending more – making back the franchisee’s initial investment.

Once this restaurant operator realized the average check with this offer showed a 27% increase over the average check without it, their corporate marketing team decided this offer was being underutilized. To continue to boost sales, the marketing team decided to run the appetizer offer in conjunction with a TV commercial. When the appetizer offer ran at the end of the commercial, the pizza chain identified patterns in the data that showed it drove higher check and increased transactions.

Over 2,700 transactions have been attributed to this offer since January 1st, 2018 – proving that when you pay attention to what your customers are responding to, and with a little help from data and analytics, you can uncover insights that will help your business thrive.

Conclusion: In Data We Trust

When you start collecting detailed customer records, it opens the doors to countless insights. Unleashing the full power of your customer profile data can be tricky, so it helps to harness technologies that are built to bring customers back and spend more.

Ready to learn more about creating more intelligent and personalized marketing campaigns? Mobivity can help get you there. Schedule your personal demo today!